Factions/Unit Set

The louder members of a community always get more attention.

So (and absolutely no offence to the original poster of that thread) completely common-sense ideas are lorded and responded to, but YourLocalMadScientist is SOL?
:|

*sighs*

I'm fully aware as to why the Dev's can't reply to those threads. Knowing that doesn't make it any easier to bare however.

Giving Uber the benefit of the doubt, I am fairly confident that they have sat and read through that, and I'd be willing to wager that it has prompted a bit of internal discussion in their offices. However, it's such a long and detailed post that it's very difficult for any one employee to just type out a response to it.

It's easy for us to say as we please here, because it's known that we all speak for ourselves. However, anyone with a red name is presumed to be speaking first on behalf of Uber and then on behalf of themselves. It's very difficult for them to give personal opinions without being viewed as a mouthpiece for the company.

So although you may not get detailed responses on the forums, I would bet that they do take ideas, especially ones as well written and reasoned as that one, from the forums and discuss them internally.

Yup. Pretty much exactly what I meant in my post above.

It's frustrating.

Factions are not needed IMHO. It's all about diversity and tactical options. The more unique units we get with that one faction in PA the better. That opens up more possible ways of battle and counters during the matches, and that is what makes fun.
Why artificially limit the unit pool a player can choose from by dividing the units into factions?
Or why waste development time and money to create near duplicates of existing units with new art assets?

I'm glad that the orbital systems post(s) is seen as a good example of something the devs might want to comment on. Although i do understand why they don't, and why my main stated purpose of that thread was providing an example to the community, rather than a suggestion to the devs.

Sadly, there are always issues with community interaction. It's entirely possible that with so much of the game in a state of flux at the moment, the devs don't want to talk too much about the directions gameplay is going in because they don't want people to quote their words as set in stone. Theres also the fact that experienced game developers don't make good games by lollygagging on the forums all day long. When you are motivated to work on a project, you want to get stuff done, not talk about getting stuff done. Furthermore, there is is the issue of control and inspiration. People don't go into games development to make other people's ideas. They do it to see their own ideas flourish. As a result I don't expect the vast torrent of suggestions exuded by these forums will necessarily elicit much dev interaction. Devs want to make their own game, not everyone else's, and that's fine as they are the ones with the most experience as to what works or doesn't.

However, if I'm being perfectly honest, I am started to become a little disappointed with the amount of dev interaction. When I backed this project, i was hoping there would be lots of opportunity to engage in discussions with the devs about how the game was developing. At the start, there was a good amount of this, and Neutrino would frequently ask the community about what we thought for the plans about commanders, and what game modes were important to us. Recently, all of the interaction has been along the lines of showing us what's going on. This is still good, and it's fantastic to see the game developing as time goes by, but it's not quite what I was hoping for in the way of community interaction. It feels less like engaging in discussion with those who care about the game, and more about throwing us a bone every so often.

There are ways around this. The number one thing we want to hear about are game features and how they will work as they are being developed. Tell us about them! If you don't know how they will work, and all you have are some ideas, then tell us about those! If you're not even happy with the ideas, then ask us how we think it should work! Nobody will hold you to putting anything we say into practice. If you can't do that, then there are still lots of people around (myself included) who love to hear the technical workings that underpins the game. Tell us about that!

I still appreciate everything the devs have done, and I understand that they are still putting more of their cards on the table at this point in the game then they ever have before. I may be being unrealistic in my expectations, but I still think more can be done to engage in the community. If you want the community to grow, and pay dividends, then it needs to be fertilized with information and discussion. The more the community develops, the more people will play PA, and get into developing ancillary content such as streams, fan art and mods. PA got off to a fantastic start, and has the potential to be the flagship project of Kickstarting a game done right. I am still optimistic that this will come to pass.

what is your suggestion?

To me I can agree the pillar is kinda obsolete but the brick is great, if you have a comander pinned in a lake some bricks and some cybran detroyers can pick him off. If they are there and the air is not.
it's really interesting.

I don't really get what you guys don't like about multiple factions.

takes starcraft's races for example. Now you really can't say they play similarly, You may have some basis from basebuilding and eco. but you need to learn different playstyles for each.

I do like the fact that in supcom you can carry your skill from one race over to the next (even though there will always be one race with wich you are far better) but I also find interesting that starcraft manages to be (pretty much) balanced even though the units differ tons.

so what gives?

I have been viewing this thread a while and let me add my two cents.

They did't release a game with a single faction so far. The type of experimenting with the people's reaction is all that matters.

Me either.

I think they don't like the fact few units or features would get cut in a place of a faction.
Furthermore they don't like multiple units under one icon with different skin and similar purpose, which seems quiet ackward to me.
They thought a player would't have access to all of the units in the game due to factions, but the army argument abolished it.
Fianally they were concerned factions would make it to difficult for the newbies.

I assume you're referring to my post regarding the actual level of faction diversity found in SupCom. The point wasn't to make a suggestion but point out that there isn't all that much uniqueness in reality, The Brick isn't a unique AAB unique for it's torpedo launcher in the same what that the Percival isn't a unique AAB for having a front loaded weapon.

It's not that the pillar is useless, as I said it's more so that alongside the full selection of units it doesn't make sense to include it.

Uber can't deal with the workload that kind of faction setup brings, not only do you have the Art Assets and Balance elements that need a lot of work, but you also need to come up with the unique mechanics (Terran's Flying Buildings vs Zerg Creep vs Protoss Power field and more beyond those) that take time as well.

Starcraft is balanced through a lot of effort and things like armor and damage types and just lots of time. It also functions on what I feel is basically the opposite of TA/SupCom/PA's simulated nature, units never miss, turn on a time ect ect and there is just too much for a clear direct comparison.

The thing is Uber is working under a lot of limits, for me at least it's not that having more than one faction can't be good, just that What it takes to make them good, is beyond what Uber can manage with the Limits they have to work with.

Mike

well here we've come down to an agreement. I have nothing more to add.

In Starcraft each unit contains many different complex types of death animations. A unit can be set on fire, poisoned, shredded, etc.
Additionaly every unit has few different animations for each type of animation. For exammple there are many animations for a zergling set on fire. Each of these animations is complex as the zergling swirls, runs and jumps of the map if it's close to the border of the map.

In Pa there will be only 3 death animations( unit geting: barely destroyed, destroyed and obliterated) Each of this animations will be simpler and will always be the same no matter the surrounding environment.

In PA/Supcom/TA there is nothing like creep, or power field. Buildings are different, but they don't affect the surrounding environment. In Ta the way buildings were beeing constructed did't differ between factions. The way buildings are build in PA is very similar to that in TA.



Units in PA don't need to be balanced that well like units in Starcraft ,since Pa is not about one unit type beeing counter to another.
In Ta there were two factions. Arm had faster, more agile units and sligthly better t1. While core had had slightly tougher and stronger t2 units. However they were słower. This type of balance is not that challenging to implement like the one from Starcraft.

Point being?

What are you basing this off of? I don't recall any of the Uber guys commenting on or confirming stuff like this.

No, there isn't any of that, but that's not the same thing as StarCraftian faction design. The problems with doing a TA/SupCom style faction setup for PA is that you end up with very shallow unit variety, instead of getting 60* unique units, you get 25* units that are functionally identical and maybe a few unique ones sprinkled in. It's False and Superficial Variety. See this post for some (slightly indirect) examples.

To be frank this is just short sighted, To say it's not as difficult to balance is one thing, but to say it doesn't need to be as well balanced is just really really bad. Due to the Simulated nature you can actually have a lot more fine grained control over the units and have more ways to differentiate them, but it still doesn't mean you can half *** it.

*Arbitrary numbers

Mike

as much as i loved the SupCom Factions, it is the best choice to implement only one faction.
I mean...balancing is a horrible business that will never work with different factions.
i will just have one faction with balanced units, instead of two factions with different play-styles and units.
its always hard to balance stuff like Sneaky VS Tanky VS Glass-Cannon, and i have never seen a game where it worked.

Also: if i have understand it correctly, our commanders will have different ability's or something like that

So...One faction = no "his stupid T1 Double-Barrel-Tank beats my T1 Stealth tank in 1V1, nerf dis"
So, lets have all the same set of units, the only "faction" is the player.
one player will use Air units, one will use Tanks, another one will build a strong defense and nukes. Each player will play his "faction" different.

Exactly.

Mike

Something something, everyone's tanks are based off German tanks because they are better?

Watch this video and on 13:30 minute marc you will get the answer.http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bU9vVC_Hchs

Pa is not supposed to be compared to Starcraft. There are only three types of animations in Pa which are simple. Therefore it will not be very hard to add second faction from the graphics perspective.

Until you get 5 players on a team doing tanks, 5 players doing aircraft, 5 players doing navy, 5 players doing defences and nukes.

5 players will battle 5 players in the second team with exactly the same tanks, 5 players from the first team will try to maintain air control and will use exactly the same fighters as the 5 players from the second team and so on.............................................

It's all down to money. Anyone would make 2 sides if they had the money.

But sad thing is, 2 million$ isnt a lot of money to make a game like this.

Same reason why it doesnt have a campaign, it would eat a huge chunck of the money.

Im sure modders will add upgrades, more balance and 2 factions to the game.

I could even see someone taking other good RTS and moves them to PA.

Would be freaking awesome playing like KKND2 or Dark Colony on this engine.

They are talking about different types of WRECKAGE and the left over visuals as opposed to stating that there will be only 3 death animations as you claim.

If anything the systems taken at face seems like it's a lot more variable, you have the Extreme 'black & white' cases of "barely died" and "Stupidly Overkilled" but everything in-between is a range of grays as opposed to a solid shade.

This shows a lack of understanding to be honest. You are bringing up pure Cosmetic aspects when we're talking about the deeper gameplay stuff that makes the Star Craftian Faction setup work. Star Craft Factions wouldn't be nearly as diverse is they all shared the same structure mechanics, sure the units are still all 100% unique but if the faction is to be 100% unique you can't stop at the units. Which brings us back to my over-arching point I'm trying to make that SupCom Style factions don't have a lot of real variety between them.

Also you ASSUME to have only "3 types of animations" when that is not strictly true, what PA does do on the other hand, is remove a lot of the Animation types needed by other games by the virtue of having a strong Emphasis on Simulation, you don't need to creat animations for aiming or recoil stuff because the engine handles that. It doesn't stop there being several different Walk, idle or death animations for each unit in any way, if anything I'm sure Uber would LOVE to do things to that kind of thing but there are many aspects that need to be account for such as Uber's own limits in terms of money and man-power, along with more gameplay oriented issues such as readability when dealing with large armies that can contain more units than and a Star Craft player could field at any one time(or in any one place given most of the Map designs).

So it's not that Uber can't give each bot 5 different Walks, its that the effort to do so doesn't have enough return once you consider the monetary cost to Uber and the fact that it's not widely noticed by players or in a worst case scenario it actually hurts the players ability to grasp what is going on when there is a pair of 200+ strong armies duking it out.

Of course, this is all cosmetics and has no influence on Factional Diversity so I'm not really sure why you bring it up at all.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, that kind of scenario only happens if there is a small selection of units to begin with, in fact this is EXACTLY the problem with SupCom. In SupCom there isn't a choice, picture your average T2 Army,

Cybran: Hoplites, Bangers, Deceivers, MAYBE Wagners if you want some amphibious play.
UEF: Mongoose, Sky Boxers and Parashields, MAYBE Riptides if you want some Amphibious play.
Seraphim: Ilshavoh, Iashavoh, MAYBE Yenzyne if you NEEDED to use an Amphibious unit.
Aeon: Obsidian, Ascendant, Asylum, Maybe Blaze if you wanted some Amphibious play or if you're still fighting against a lot of T1 units.

There is no Variety(or at least effective variety) in that, you'd never build Rhinos against Mongooses because not only to the Mongooses have a 30% range advantage, they also have a speed advantage.

Part of the reasoning(or at least a benefit of) going with a single unit pool is that Ideally, youcan have to players going for different strategies and have neither of them using the same units as the other.

Think of it like Combining all the SupCom factions together, first thing you do is chuck out all the nigh-identical units(keeping one of course) like LABs, T2 Mobile Missile Launchers and T2 Flak and then start figuring out if there are other units that aren't nigh-identical, but overlap with another unit or that are rendered obsolete by another unit. To use my T2 Tank example from the post I just linked this is what the Final line-up of units could look like;

Wagner, Rhino, Obsidian, Surface Amphibious Unit(Riptide OR Blaze OR Yenzyne), T2 Missile Launcher( Flapjack OR Ythisah OR Evensong OR Viper), T2 AA(Ascendant OR Banger OR Sky boxer OR Iashavoh)

Suddenly, even without making any other changes, you have a LOT more options available to choose from, there will be some balance tweaks needed to get it working really really well, but it's still very functional as is.

And of course you'll have a similar selection for Bots, hopefully Air and Naval as well. How is this not a better option than a 4V4 in SupCom where everyone builds the handful of useful/effective units every game?

Mike

and whats wrong with that?
there are already many videos with gameplay, they have the same units and there are usually many ups and downs, expanding and destruction etc.
the team who can handle the units better will win, not the team with the best air/ground/naval unit.
If you know that your enemy faction has the strongest ground-bots, you wont send in a faction with the weakest bots. that's where i see the biggest problem, usually you are forced to play a specific role when the faction specific units are so different.
Aeon had the only T3 Missile ship for Coast Bombard, the only T3 Torpedo Bomber, and the strongest (Speed and DPS) Anti-Naval Battleship. And they had an even stronger Anti-Naval Experimental Battleship with factory module. Direct Naval combat against Aeon? horrible idea.
Also its very hard to beat a UEF turtle if you give them enough time.
Seraphim could do everything, OP faction ftw -.-

So, one set of units and maybe slightly different commanders? same chance for everyone

Play zero k it has 1 faction and i found it worked for me.
If it did not work for you please explain it.